How can you not understand that this is exactly the reason anti-consumer laws are there? They are there to protect your interests.
If there were no laws the corporations would take as much as they could from you while giving you as little as they could. They're not humanitarian organizations.
Early access flies dangerously close to breaking these laws and arguably has broken them in several past instances regarding other more dubious early access titles.
This may seem hard to believe but I'm not trying to antagonize you. I am just shocked that you think early access is an acceptable business model.
To be fair to Space Engineers it is probably one of the better examples of an early access title. I don't believe in any way that it's a scam or anything like that. But that doesn't excuse early access as a business model in my mind.
I do understand what you are saying, I just protest your statement that it is analogous to drunk driving or other criminal behavior.
How would you define a completed game? Is Kerbal Space Program a complete game? Did they exit early access in a manner acceptable to you? It's arguable that KSP is missing several features which were discussed at the beginning of development. A complex resource system for one.
What about Elite Dangerous? No offline play, missing many features. Sure they plan to add them in... what if they don't?
To construct a system of law to protect the consumer from this behavior, you first have to define the success state. Was it okay for stardrive to slap a 1.0 on their current version and release it, calling it done? Stardrive's release state had several bugs, broken features and some encounters that just didn't plain work.
What about X Rebirth? That game was a mess on release and still is today after going though 2.0 and 3.0 're-releases'. Does it get a pass because it didn't have an early access phase so releasing garbage is okay? Isn't that also anti-consumer?
Or are you only focused on cases where someone charged for early access or had a kickstarter campaign and then failed to deliver anything at all? or is it okay if they deliver half the features? 75%? is it okay if it's a bit buggy but playable?
Y'all better start amplifying your relaxed states right now. The Toad, he don't get mad so often, but when he gets a'swingin' that ban hammer, ain't nobody gonna walk outta that thread but him. *Picks up beat up old guitar, puts on hat, and saunters right out the back door with conservative haste.*
Nobody here is upset or anything, we're having a discussion which is very much on topic for this game. I'm not sure anything we've said is 'ban worthy' or why you would even threaten that, but alright. I'll stop, since people are upset.